Have you ever played an RTS (real time strategy) game and had a bunch of little cities in your empire, and suddenly, someone sends over a group of Grunts and they start hammering away at one of your buildings? If you want to win, you get on that shit!
In all seriousness though, if I was President of the United States of America and I was informed that the country was UNDER ATTACK (how many Presidents have even gotten this news??) I would be stunned and immediately want details and information. I would not sit for more than 20 seconds and look dumbfounded while reading with some school kids, much less 10 minutes or whatever it was.
Just because he couldn't have done anything that moment doesn't mean his reaction isn't mind-boggling. When the country is under attack and he finds out, I want him to DROP EVERYTHING that he is doing (whether he's out golfing, reading to kids, whatever... if he were golfing, would he have finished his round, or just that hole maybe??).
Seriously....
"..or install custom skins, maps, etc. "
Yeah, it's tricky to copy a file to the "maps" subdirectory... I had custom sprays and maps installed for CS:Source over Steam in matter of minutes.
That's an excellent point. It's very similar to a music artist hyping up and pre-selling their own album before it releases, directly to fans (downloadable from their web site).
I don't play on LANs nor do I go to Quakcon. I play at home, on my PC. I don't care if it activates, I'm online all the time anyway. And I don't care about Valve having my credit card number, anymore than I care about sending it to ebgames.com.
Just think of all the script-kiddy wanna-be "hackers" that directed attention at HL2 when it was delayed. Can you really blame them for having their MS software exploited? That's like hanging a piece of steak from your crotch and running into a dog kennel with the cages open.
A lot of people that don't buy games and like to pirate would be irritated with a system like Steam, since it ensures that most people will actually have to purchase the game. That's why you'll see a lot of people say they want a CD... it's like those people that claim they are making "backups" of their discs for personal use, but are really just pirating from friends and online.
Yeah, buzz for HL2 is pretty laxluster... they should probably start running banner ads on slashdot or something....I hadn't even heard of it before this article. hehe
I prefer Steam to other methods of purchasing a game. You don't have to go anywhere or pay shipping costs, you don't have to keep track of a CD, and hopefully, more of the money goes to the people that MADE the game, rather than filling the pockets of marketers and distributors. If I like a game, I want the people that made it to get the money, encouraging patches, new versions, and modifications.
You see all this nonsense about Steam being terrible/people hating it/etc. I think they were using an earlier version. I'm a stickler about what I use / let run in the background of a Windows machine, even. I'm all about Firefox, nothing next to the clock, REALUPDATE.exe can die, all superfluous services are disabled.
And still, this Steam software works fine and doesn't bother me. That's a bigger achievement than Realplayer can claim.
Where I come from, "greenhousing" is the term used when you get a bunch of people in a car, roll up the windows and smoke ridiculous amounts of pot, filling the inside with smoke.
If you don't go get your gas tank valved fixed in an official manufacturer recall from your car company, and your car blows up, whose fault is it?
Handy for swimming pool owners... not really
on
Robot Walks on Water
·
· Score: 1
At first I thought "Why not have one of these with a wireless transmitter, testing for PH imbalance, chlorine levels, even surface temperature, and then sending it back to some sort of auto-clronie / ph adjustment / heater system..." Then I realized, you could build the testing into the distribution system.
So, anyway, what's this for again?
I used to live near a Hummer plant. It's important to remember that this was originally a military vehicle that has been commercialized for civilians.
Here's the only GOOD REASON I can think of:
America has one of the LARGEST non-enlisted standing armies in the world. Think about how many guns we have, how many people own firearms and can use them. If there were ever a ground-invasion in the USA, the enemy would not only have to contend with the military, but every redneck with a sawed off shotgun and a 1/5 of Jim Beam, to gun enthusiasts, to gun salesmen, to paintball players that decide to arm themselves, to... you get the idea.
So, why not equip your standing civilian army with easily-convertible-to-military-use Hummers? I mean, they've turned civilian airliners into troop transports and bombers before. Hell, drive down the cost of Hummer production by selling them to civilians, and have a huge stock of them should they ever be needed (not to mention further bolstering the civilian population's ground capabilities).
You laugh at the idea of a ground invasion, but if anyone were to start launching nukes, or the USA stopped exporting food, or any number of things, you might be glad your neighbor has 2 handguns, a rifle, and an H2.
Of course, they are hell on the enviornment, most people buy them because they are trendy, they are giant for not apparent use other than a symbol of disgusting excess, and uh yeah. So. You make up your own mind.
"steady 42 FPS" is still average. you can no doubt get enough stuff on the screen at once, or certain GPU intensive scenes, where that frame rate may drop considerably. this can be irritating for people who are serious gamers.
Also, 30 frames per second = 33.3ms lag between frames, whereas 120fps drives that down to 8.3ms. If you're an avid online gamer, how important it is to have low latency an all aspects of your hardware and connectivity so maximize your ability to react and the computer receive those reactions.
Now, the clueless people that are FPS tweaking--because other people do it too and it seems cool to them and/or it's a hobby of theirs--and try to squeeze an extra 3 fps so they can get 78 fps instead of 75 fps in their favorite game, well, that is just an "absurd form of posturing."
Ignorance warning: I don't know much about the technology, but scanline interweaving seems like it's difficult to pull off with present day technology because of anti-aliasing algorithms, temporal AA, etc. These things have to be calculated, and available on both cards if they are generating the image line by line (alternating turns). It's "obvious" in that it makes sense intuitively, but technologically, it seems like a more impressive feat.
wouldn't this really screw up in-office wifi?
on
Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you're using this to keep wireless data inside (and not pervent transmission altogether), doesn't it seem like this would defeat any chance at room to room wifi access? I mean, it's hard enough to get good signal strenth in buildings without having some futuristic alien-technology inspired government stealth ultra-anti-signal wallpaper in the place.
Once you can type as fast as you speak on average, you can train yourself to stream consciousness onto the screen. It's interesting to do sometimes.
In terms of utility, I can still type 2x as fast and more accurately than any other means. I'm sure input/output systems will evolve to a point in the next decade that makes typing seem like a fading relic.
But once the Terminator fails to prevent the nuclear war, post-holocaust you may be happy you retained your typing skills so you can coordinate the efforts of people and become their new fast typing overlord!
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever played an RTS (real time strategy) game and had a bunch of little cities in your empire, and suddenly, someone sends over a group of Grunts and they start hammering away at one of your buildings? If you want to win, you get on that shit! In all seriousness though, if I was President of the United States of America and I was informed that the country was UNDER ATTACK (how many Presidents have even gotten this news??) I would be stunned and immediately want details and information. I would not sit for more than 20 seconds and look dumbfounded while reading with some school kids, much less 10 minutes or whatever it was. Just because he couldn't have done anything that moment doesn't mean his reaction isn't mind-boggling. When the country is under attack and he finds out, I want him to DROP EVERYTHING that he is doing (whether he's out golfing, reading to kids, whatever... if he were golfing, would he have finished his round, or just that hole maybe??). Seriously....
I had a couple of lucid points until I read this....(3:13 a.m. here...)
It's a strange time we live in when astronauts are flying into space and note large plumes of smoke from ongoing wars.
"..or install custom skins, maps, etc. " Yeah, it's tricky to copy a file to the "maps" subdirectory... I had custom sprays and maps installed for CS:Source over Steam in matter of minutes.
That's an excellent point. It's very similar to a music artist hyping up and pre-selling their own album before it releases, directly to fans (downloadable from their web site).
I agree. I think people that pirate also take an anti-Steam position since they might have to actually buy the game and support the devs.
I don't play on LANs nor do I go to Quakcon. I play at home, on my PC. I don't care if it activates, I'm online all the time anyway. And I don't care about Valve having my credit card number, anymore than I care about sending it to ebgames.com.
Just think of all the script-kiddy wanna-be "hackers" that directed attention at HL2 when it was delayed. Can you really blame them for having their MS software exploited? That's like hanging a piece of steak from your crotch and running into a dog kennel with the cages open.
A lot of people that don't buy games and like to pirate would be irritated with a system like Steam, since it ensures that most people will actually have to purchase the game. That's why you'll see a lot of people say they want a CD... it's like those people that claim they are making "backups" of their discs for personal use, but are really just pirating from friends and online.
Yeah, buzz for HL2 is pretty laxluster... they should probably start running banner ads on slashdot or something....I hadn't even heard of it before this article. hehe
I prefer Steam to other methods of purchasing a game. You don't have to go anywhere or pay shipping costs, you don't have to keep track of a CD, and hopefully, more of the money goes to the people that MADE the game, rather than filling the pockets of marketers and distributors. If I like a game, I want the people that made it to get the money, encouraging patches, new versions, and modifications. You see all this nonsense about Steam being terrible/people hating it/etc. I think they were using an earlier version. I'm a stickler about what I use / let run in the background of a Windows machine, even. I'm all about Firefox, nothing next to the clock, REALUPDATE.exe can die, all superfluous services are disabled. And still, this Steam software works fine and doesn't bother me. That's a bigger achievement than Realplayer can claim.
Where I come from, "greenhousing" is the term used when you get a bunch of people in a car, roll up the windows and smoke ridiculous amounts of pot, filling the inside with smoke.
If you don't go get your gas tank valved fixed in an official manufacturer recall from your car company, and your car blows up, whose fault is it?
At first I thought "Why not have one of these with a wireless transmitter, testing for PH imbalance, chlorine levels, even surface temperature, and then sending it back to some sort of auto-clronie / ph adjustment / heater system..." Then I realized, you could build the testing into the distribution system. So, anyway, what's this for again?
the article says nothing can be hacker proof? seriously? nothing?
I said you might be glad. Geeze, you're the kind of suicidal high strung person the rest of us should be worried about. :)
I used to live near a Hummer plant. It's important to remember that this was originally a military vehicle that has been commercialized for civilians.
Here's the only GOOD REASON I can think of:
America has one of the LARGEST non-enlisted standing armies in the world. Think about how many guns we have, how many people own firearms and can use them. If there were ever a ground-invasion in the USA, the enemy would not only have to contend with the military, but every redneck with a sawed off shotgun and a 1/5 of Jim Beam, to gun enthusiasts, to gun salesmen, to paintball players that decide to arm themselves, to... you get the idea.
So, why not equip your standing civilian army with easily-convertible-to-military-use Hummers? I mean, they've turned civilian airliners into troop transports and bombers before. Hell, drive down the cost of Hummer production by selling them to civilians, and have a huge stock of them should they ever be needed (not to mention further bolstering the civilian population's ground capabilities).
You laugh at the idea of a ground invasion, but if anyone were to start launching nukes, or the USA stopped exporting food, or any number of things, you might be glad your neighbor has 2 handguns, a rifle, and an H2.
Of course, they are hell on the enviornment, most people buy them because they are trendy, they are giant for not apparent use other than a symbol of disgusting excess, and uh yeah. So. You make up your own mind.
"steady 42 FPS" is still average. you can no doubt get enough stuff on the screen at once, or certain GPU intensive scenes, where that frame rate may drop considerably. this can be irritating for people who are serious gamers.
Also, 30 frames per second = 33.3ms lag between frames, whereas 120fps drives that down to 8.3ms. If you're an avid online gamer, how important it is to have low latency an all aspects of your hardware and connectivity so maximize your ability to react and the computer receive those reactions.
Now, the clueless people that are FPS tweaking--because other people do it too and it seems cool to them and/or it's a hobby of theirs--and try to squeeze an extra 3 fps so they can get 78 fps instead of 75 fps in their favorite game, well, that is just an "absurd form of posturing."
Ignorance warning: I don't know much about the technology, but scanline interweaving seems like it's difficult to pull off with present day technology because of anti-aliasing algorithms, temporal AA, etc. These things have to be calculated, and available on both cards if they are generating the image line by line (alternating turns). It's "obvious" in that it makes sense intuitively, but technologically, it seems like a more impressive feat.
--> http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/ex tra/nearest.html
nearest 26 stars.
i could be wrong, but the closest star (not including Sol) is a bit further than 10 light years :)
...but of course they want you to use protection.
If you're using this to keep wireless data inside (and not pervent transmission altogether), doesn't it seem like this would defeat any chance at room to room wifi access? I mean, it's hard enough to get good signal strenth in buildings without having some futuristic alien-technology inspired government stealth ultra-anti-signal wallpaper in the place.
Once you can type as fast as you speak on average, you can train yourself to stream consciousness onto the screen. It's interesting to do sometimes. In terms of utility, I can still type 2x as fast and more accurately than any other means. I'm sure input/output systems will evolve to a point in the next decade that makes typing seem like a fading relic. But once the Terminator fails to prevent the nuclear war, post-holocaust you may be happy you retained your typing skills so you can coordinate the efforts of people and become their new fast typing overlord!
i'm upset no one modded the parent funny. hehe... once they've gone black, they never go back.
Hey baby, you ever had your port knocked by a black hat?